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Sochi • Got to agree with Vladimir Putin on one point: Having winter weather at the Winter Olympics? Highly overrated.

Surf's up at the Sochi Games. Let's go swimming.

Within sight of the ice palace where a gold medal in figure skating was awarded Friday, I stepped off a rock-strewn beach and jumped in the Black Sea for an invigorating dip in the chilly water.

Oh, yes I did.

What, you want proof?

"I will take a photo of you swimming in the Black Sea. But I will not save you," said Elena Solodkaya, a 23-year-old college student from Moscow.

After grabbing my cellphone to snap the pics, she politely claimed dibs in the event a goofy American visitor to Russia did not return to shore. "What is the name of your wife? I promise to call her, if you drown," said Solodkaya, her sarcasm as dry as the finest Russian vodka. "I will stand here until she flies from the United States. Then I will point at the sea and say: 'That is the spot where I last saw him.' "

Entering the cold, saline water with tender feet on slippery, round rocks, my first steps from the shore were as graceful as stumbling down stairs.

"You look like a big, white bear," said Solodkaya, failing to indicate whether she was referencing my lack of tan, my lack of coordination or my lack of muscle tone.

With a magnificent belly flop, the big, white bear jumped in the deep, Black Sea, a vast body of water of more than 150,000 square miles. At its deepest, the distance to the bottom is 7,000 feet. On this late winter day in Russia, the water was definitely a frigid slap in the face.

I began swimming in the general direction of Yalta, where Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin met in 1945. But after about 25 yards, the tingling in my toes caused common sense to kick in, and I decided to turn back with a slow crawl toward the sun shining on the beach.

"It's like Miami Beach," shouted Solodkaya. "No?"

Well, not exactly.

But the air temperature was 64 degrees outside the Bolshoy Ice Dome when Avalanche star Gabriel Landeskog and his Swedish teammates jumped over the boards to play Switzerland in an afternoon hockey game. The palm trees of Sochi stood sentry outside the arena. This ain't Siberia, where 50-below zero can be considered a nice night in February.

"You'd have to spend a long time searching the map of this huge country to find some place with no snow. Putin found it," Russian politician Boris Nemstov told a documentary film crew before the Winter Games began.

When I rode a bus from the coast to the mountains to witness American men sweep the medals in ski slopestyle, it looked like mud season. At many of the venues, snow is little more than a prop. The gorgeous weather and slush on the lower slopes at the Rosa Khutor Extreme Park reminded me of Spring Splash, the farewell to ski season celebration at Winter Park, my home hill in Colorado.

Nordic combined star Todd Lodwick of Steamboat Springs joked these Winter Olympics have put him in the mood for a margarita, chips and salsa. If Sochi can serve as host of the Winter Olympics, then why not Sacramento or Charlotte? Heck, for $50 billion, you would think any host city could buy as much snow as any downhill racer needs.

In a recent opinion piece ominously titled " The End of Snow?" published by The New York Times, a fine writer named Porter Fox shook a fist of warning: If the global average temperature increases by 7 degrees during the next century, as some climatologists predict, the Winter Olympics could become an endangered species by 2100.

Chill out, dude.

Last I checked, it has been snowing like crazy in New York City and much of the United States. So we're supposed to lose sleep about the polar ice cap melting 100 years down the road, when our local TV weatherperson can't even get the 10-day forecast right?

Who needs snow? Pass me the sun block.

At the Games in Sochi, bronzing has nothing to do with winning a medal.

Mark Kiszla: mkiszla@denverpost.com or twitter.com/markkiszla

Read more: Kiszla: Winter Games? Sochi so warm, white bear swims in Black Sea - The Denver Post http://www.denverpost.com/kiszla/ci_25145114/winter-games-sochi-so-warm-white-bear-swims#ixzz2tL0pCrW2

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